EWG isn’t advocating avoiding produce. Their take-home message — which didn’t make it into much of the more sensationalist press coverage, alas — is very clear:

“Eat your fruits and vegetables! The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure. Use EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides to reduce your exposures as much as possible, but eating conventionally-grown produce is far better than not eating fruits and vegetables at all.”

On this, AICR and EWG agree. Our expert report on cancer prevention, and its updates, make clear that everyone’s priority should be on getting more vegetables and fruits into the diet — get them fresh, canned or frozen, get them organic or conventional, but get them.

If you can afford organic, and are concerned about pesticide residues — or opt for organic for other reasons such as issues of land and water use — do so. If you can’t, know that the cancer protection you’re getting from eating a variety of vegetables and fruits outweighs the potential risks associated with pesticides.

This is a notoriously difficult area to study. There is evidence linking high doses of pesticides to cancer in the laboratory, and to cancer in farm workers and others who are professionally exposed to high levels of pesticides over many years. But we still lack evidence from human studies that pesticides cause cancer at the levels they exist in US diets – a country where pesticide use is regulated.

Watch this space – we’ll know more as methods of studying this hot topic improve. In the meantime, get your vegetables and fruits however you choose to, rinse them thoroughly … and don’t shun that Red Delicious.